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OS X Mountain Lion: What’s New - The System (Part 7)

11/30/2012 9:10:34 AM

Contacts & Calendars

Two familiar OS X apps get new names in Mountain Lion: Address Book becomes Contacts, and iCal is transformed into Calendars. But the changes in both apps are more than name-deep.

Contacts

Contacts marks the return of the beloved three-column view found in Snow Leopard’s Address Book. In Lion, Address Book offered a two column view: It either showed groups on the left page and a list of contacts within that group on the right, or if clicked the bookmark at the top of the page – a group’s contact list on the left and a selected contact on the right.

Description: Three columns: Contacts restores the three-column view: groups on the left, contact lists in the center, and individual contacts on the right.

Three columns: Contacts restores the three-column view: groups on the left, contact lists in the center, and individual contacts on the right.

Mountain Lion’s Contacts puts the list of groups on the left, a list of contacts in the middle, and a specific contact’s card on the right the same arrangement Snow Leopard used. You can switch between three-, two-, and one-column views by clicking the appropriate buttons at the bottom of the contacts window or by choosing Groups, List And Card, or Card Only, respectively, from the View menu.

Mountain Lion’s Contacts app addresses another issue that has confounded users for years: what happens when you have the same contact on more than one service  iCloud, Yahoo, and Google, say? Often, that one person would appear as three separate entries. Contacts fixes that with a unified view that incorporates information from multiple services for a single contact. So if you’ve stored Sally Jone’s street address in iCloud, her phone number on Yahoo, and her email address in your Google contacts, Contacts should create a single entry that combines all of those bits of information.

If a person has multiple records, but Contacts doesn’t recognize them as belonging to the same individual, you can combine them. Select one press  and select the other, and then choose Merge And Link Selected Cards from the Card menu. The two cards will become one. When you examine this newly unified card, you’ll see a Linked Card entry that indicates the accounts and names from which the information originated – Yahoo and iCloud, for instance, under the names Chris Breen and Christopher Breen.

Finally, Contacts expands the Share button’s talents. Under Lion, if you selected a contact and then clicked the Share button at the bottom of the Window, Mail would open and create an unaddressed email message with the contact attached as a vCard file. Click the Share button in Contacts and, in addition to Email choices: Message Card and AirDrop Card. Description: Sharing: As with other Mountain Lion apps, sharing options are built into Contacts: From a given record, click the Share button to send it via Mail, Messages, or AirDrop.

Sharing: As with other Mountain Lion apps, sharing options are built into Contacts: From a given record, click the Share button to send it via Mail, Messages, or AirDrop.

When you choose Message Card, a new message window appears with the card embedded as a vCard file. To send it, just address the message and click the Send button. AirDrop Card works similarly. When you select it, an AirDrop window appears, along with the embedded vCard. Anyone on your local network who has the AirDrop window open can receive the card. All you have to do select a recipient and press the Send button.

Calendar

Like Contacts, Calendar offers a welcome combination of a retired-but-returned feature and new capabilities.

For one thing, the Calendars pane reappears. In Lion’s iCal, to choose among your many calendars, you had to click a Calendars button and select your calendar from the resulting drop-down list. In Mountain Lion, that list has returned to the left pane, where it was located in Snow Leopard. Click the Calendars button in the top left portion of the screen to show or hide this pane.

On the new side of the ledger, Calendar introduces search suggestions. Such as with Spotlight, when you type a term into Calendar’s Search field, matching (or nearly matching) events appear in a list. Enter Dentist, for example, and you may find Dentist Appointment or simply Dentist. Choose one of those suggestions, and matching events appear in a list on the right. You can focus searches on event titles, location, invites, or words in event notes.

In its Edit and Inspector windows, Calendars includes a mini-calendar display. Click a date within one of those windows, and the mini-calendar appears. When you choose a different date on the calendar, your event shifts to that date. You can also change end times for events more easily: Click the ending time for an event, and a menu appears that lets you shift that time back half an hour (from 3:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., for example) or forward, in half-hour increments, up to 3 hours after the beginning of the event.

Given how fiddly the Information and Edit windows can be, any opportunity to simply click in lieu of having to click and type is welcome.

Finally, in addition to throwing up an alert when an event alarm goes off, Calendar posts alerts in Mountain Lion’s Notification Center. If you’ve chosen to show events in Notification Center (you can turn this option off in the Notifications presences pane), you can’t remove calendar events by clicking an X next to an application heading, as you can with other applications. Calendar events remain in Notification Center until they expire. Description: Calendar search: Enter a search term in Calendar, and the application finds it in event titles, locations, invitees, and even notes.

Calendar search: Enter a search term in Calendar, and the application finds it in event titles, locations, invitees, and even notes.

As is the case with other items that involve notifications, you can configure how event alerts behave in the Notifications system preference. By default, calendar events appear as alerts that you must acknowledge. If you prefer a banner that flashes and then disappears, choose that option in the Notifications preference pane.

Safari

Safari has been around forever, and you might not think Apple could do much to improve it in Mountain Lion. But the company has found some clever – and welcome – ways to update the app.

Description: Do not track: Previous editions of Safari supported the Do Not Track standard; Safari 6.0 makes it more accessible.

Do not track: Previous editions of Safari supported the Do Not Track standard; Safari 6.0 makes it more accessible.

Tabs and search

One way Apple accomplished that positive result was by taking some inspiration from other browsers. The most obvious example is the new unified address and search bar. Like Google Chrome, Safari 6.0 has a single text box up top (instead of supplying one box for Web addresses and another for searching).

Type a URL in the new box, and the browser goes to that site. Type some text in it, and Safri performs a search for that term. As you type, the browser shows you a drop-down list of possible hits. First comes a section that it calls Top Hits – the things it guesses are most likely what you’re looking for, based on your previous patterns. After that, Safari lists some possible search term you might want to use on Google, the default search engine. (You can, of course, change that default in the application’s preferences). Below that are matching hits in your browsing history and bookmarks.

The other way Apple has updated Safari is something it has done throughout Mountain Lion: typing the desktop OS and its apps more tightly than ever to iOS and iCloud.

In this regard, the new Safari offers something called iCloud Tabs. Clicking the iCloud Tabs button (the one with the cloud on it up in the toolbar) produces a live list of the browser tabs that are open on all of the other OS X and iOS machines linked to your Apple ID and iCloud account.

What that potentially means is that you can start reading something on your iPhone, and then switch to your Mac later and pick up where you left off. We say potentially because this feature won’t be fully functional until the release of iOS 6 this fall. For now, it works well for syncing Safri tabs between Macs.

There’s also a touch-friendly new Tab View. If you have a touchpad, you can reveal all of the tabs you have open with a pinch gesture; then you can switch between them using a two-finger swipe left or right. These new gestures feel familiar gestures in iOS. Visually, tabs emulate those in iOS. Visually, tabs emulate those in iOS: They stretch and shrink as necessary to fill the span of your browser window.

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